Liberal and Loving It

The Future of Social Media

I think we're going to see "social media" evolve into something a lot more destructive of society and our own mental health.

We're presently in a transition where the feed in your social media will no longer be what your friends post and instead will be content curated by a machine learning algorithm. This is in its infancy and already can give you a feed that is a lot more compelling.

Now you might say, this is great. Instead of taking people down a rabbit hole of crazy conspiracy theories it can provide people a positive uplifting worldview that brings out best in each of us. Yeah? So find a feed of articles that both Bernie Saunders & Mike Pence will agree is a good worldview. Not happening.

But it gets worse. Because what are the social media companies selling? Ads. And that means they not only want to make their product as addictive as possible, but they want it to set the viewers up to purchase what is being advertised to them. The feeds won't be designed to make us all happier and looking to get along with others. It will be designed first to make it more addictive than opium. And the strongest emotive addiction is fear. The algorithms will give each of us a feed designed to make us afraid of everything.

On top of that, they will tie the answer to that fear to be whatever their advertisers are selling. It can be a politician, survival gear, or a car. The feeds will be adapted to tie the solution to the fear being presented to the specific ads that user is being shown. Your emotional state will be trashed & destroyed in service of selling what the ads on the social media platforms are selling.

And it won't be just social media feeds. In the next couple of generations the ML algos will be able to write books, play songs, and show movies based on your personal tastes & desires. We'll all be getting a unique feed of unique content. And again, in this there can be tie ins to what the advertisers are selling. Politicians, soap, automobiles - all of them can be inserted into this content in a way that will most appeal to the viewer it is created for.

And the repetition from the multiple sources, all of it designed to most effectively get into your long term memory, will make it incredibly effective.

And you thought people who have Fox News constantly on at home in the background were being brainwashed...

Getting Inside the Republican's OODA loop

For those of you unaware of it, getting inside the enemy's OODA loop is arguably the most powerful advantage in combat. And it holds outside of combat in business, sports, and politics among other things.

In the 2016 election Donald Trump was a master at flying well inside Hillary Clinton's loop. To a degree that it looked like Trump was a master at it while Clinton was unaware of it. I don't know if either was formally familiar with the OODA construct, but if not, Trump figured it out otherwise and it made for a very one sided fight.

The Biden campaign I don't think ever got inside Trump's loop, but they responded a lot better to it. Close enough that they won the election decisively.

But I don't see the Democratic party making use of this now. One of the key's to getting inside the other's loop is while the Republicans are responding to the political attack yesterday, the Democrats are already past that and have levied two more attacks in series. When the Republicans get caught up to those two new ones, there are already another two.

The trick is the Republicans are left responding to old news where the Democrats have already set the story for that old news and moved on to new and more important (in the moment) items.

I think part of it is we Democrats tend to want to take the time to cover an issue in detail and with facts and logic make our position unassailable. The thing is, that lets the Republicans fly inside our loop and choose the topic of the day.

As an example, with MTG's call to defund the FBI and McCarthy's threats to the DOJ, the Democratic party should be all in today as the party of law & order. Equally important, they should be ready to hit the Republicans with something new tomorrow, maybe the Republicans opposing more funding for the IRS to go after tax cheats. And then Thursday go after them for not capping Insulin prices.

What's key is as the Republicans are starting to respond to each attack, figure out what the next best attack is and hit them with that. Leave them to flounder discussing yesterday's news after the country has moved on.

What the Dems should not do is focus on defending the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago and discussing the Republicans lack of support for law & order. Yes hit them on that, but then re-orient to a new attack. And a second. The win comes from leaving them floundering on the raid as we bring in new attack after new attack.